Sarge and Miller from the #Big Deer Hunt Team just got back from an eventful weekend in South Texas. They drove down to hunt hogs, but the pigs weren't cooperating. Most people think hog hunting in Texas is guaranteed, but it's not. Pigs can be tricky, often coming out into the open at or near dark, especially on a ranch where they've been shot at and worked on pretty good. Anyway, the hog hunt quickly turned into a creepy combo: sheds and rattlesnakes. I got text updates throughout the weekend, which was ok for the sheds but freaky with the snakes. The final tally: 0 hogs, a dozen or so antlers and 4 ugly serpents, which they proudly displayed on my Yeti to freak me out (and make me wonder what's inside the next time I open that [...]

O’Connor, one of the greatest hunters and writers of the 20th century and one of my heroes, wrote this in his 1967 book, The Art of Hunting Big Game in America: “That crafty old whitetail buck above the fireplace is a lot smarter and harder to come by than any Stone sheep or any tiger that ever lived." The simple and insightful writing by men who knew how to hunt and lived it is marvelous, isn’t it? Sadly, there are few hunting writers like that anymore. Worse, there are virtually no good-paying opportunities in the outdoor genre for men to hunt and write like that anymore.

Just in time for turkey season I ran across this blog with a series of creepy, horrible rattlesnake pictures. I guess they are rattlers, but I am not for sure…I have never gotten that close to one, dead or alive, thank God. Plus, I think they are Mississippi snakes, and they have giant rattlers down there. The snakes standing up freaked me out. I envision those evil things seeing me down through the woods and charging forward, slithering and dancing, and if that happened I’d have the big one and for sure be done. I don’t know squat about snakes, and don’t want to, but I texted my buddy Sarge, who has done a lot of spring habitat work in the South and [...]